October 15 · This Day in America
On a Monday night, CBS airs a half hour of a redheaded woman and her Cuban bandleader husband, and around fifteen million Americans watch a wife scheme her way into her husband's nightclub act. It is funny in a way television had not quite been before. But the quiet revolution is behind the camera. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had insisted on shooting it in Hollywood, on film, with three cameras running at once before a live audience — a method invented partly so she could stay near home for her pregnancy, and partly because Arnaz refused to let the network water down a marriage to a Cuban man. That stubbornness became the blueprint. The multi-camera sitcom, the rerun, the syndicated afterlife of a show — all of it starts here, with a woman willing to fall down for a laugh and a couple who owned what they made. America laughed together on a schedule now.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1966
In a North Oakland anti-poverty office, two Merritt College students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, write a Ten-Point Program and form the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. It begins as armed citizens following police to witness arrests of Black residents, legally, in the open. It grows into free breakfast programs, clinics, and one of the most surveilled, mythologized, and contested movements in American history — a hard, unfinished argument about who the law protects.
Source: www.archives.gov